Content planning for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes is an essential aspect of digital marketing for every business, and aesthetic clinics are no different. However, no aesthetic practitioner wants to fill their already busy days even further. So, here, we’re going to simplify things a little with some clarity on the process you need to follow, and give you a head start with some techniques which will improve your marketing performance more rapidly.
First steps: definitions
First up, a few definitions. SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’. When you run a search on Google, something has to decide in what order the thousands of results are listed. That something is an algorithm – a set of rules. As a business owner, you want your website to appear near the top of the list, and SEO is the art of understanding the algorithm and abiding by its rules for the best exposure.
This causes content planning to matter because the ‘usefulness and relevancy’ of content is one of the key criteria by which the algorithm judges the strength of your website.1 An effective content plan will improve your search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your website.
The official process
There’s a relatively simple process for basic SEO optimisation – this will be our starting point and will give you the basic principles. However, as business (and SEO in particular) is intensely competitive, once we’ve got this baseline in place, we can look at some additional smart ways of reducing time and effort while raising the quality of our SEO performance. The below provides a standard SEO process.
Keyword research
Among other things, those algorithms look for keywords. It’s no surprise that someone who types ‘Aesthetic Practice’ or ‘Dermal Fillers’ is looking for someone like you. Keyword research will help you identify the keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for when looking for aesthetic services, so you can include them in your content. Google Keyword Planner and Semrush are some resources to help with this.2,3
Refine for your target audience
We all operate in different parts of the market. Look at the town or city you are based in. Which group/groups of people are you targeting? Mid-market? Mainly female? Or higher-end/high disposable income? Athletes? Working parents? Identify the demographic, interests and concerns of your target audience and tailor both your keywords and content to meet their needs. Drop the keywords they won’t use (for example, devices or products that you don’t offer or which don’t solve their problems) and keep the ones which do.
Create a content calendar
Plan and organise your content in advance, typically in three to four month blocks, and ensure that you are regularly publishing new and relevant content to your website. Your content, which you will ideally be publishing at least two to three times per month, should be simple, informative, include your keywords and provide value to your target audience – don’t just sell. Whatever you create or read, always watch it back. Ask yourself: would I be glad to read this as a customer? If you can’t say yes to that, go back and revise.
If this sounds like hell, don’t worry – we’re going to come back to this below.
Optimise your content for SEO
Adding your keywords was a good start. But SEO is incremental. The more ‘goodies’ you can add, the better.! Make sure that blogs, for example, have titles and descriptions (which helps Google tie your content to relevant searches). Include images and videos in your content if you can, as this will make it more engaging and shareable, as well as adding links to other websites. All of these have value to search engines. Don’t spend a lifetime looking for SEO bonus points, though – nobody can do everything.
Don’t forget to measure the results
Use tools like Google Analytics to track the traffic to your website, seeing which of your marketing channels are delivering traffic, and which of your blog articles are garnering the most engagement. Look at tools like Google Search Console or MOZ.com and keep an eye on those keywords as they can change at any time.4,5
The black-belt approach
You’ll find variations of the above process in countless books and websites, and it works just fine. There are two shortcomings, though. First, it’s all good for a highly-resourced business, but most aesthetic practices are under-resourced (that’s not a criticism – it’s just the truth!). You don’t have the time to create acres of content on a scattergun basis and hope for the best. Second, in my view, it lacks ambition. Aesthetic patients seek education, comfort, expertise and nurturing and you can be the person to provide it.
With the right approach and the right content, you can become the respected practitioner for local customers seeking answers to their valued questions. Your website can become the ‘go to’ source of trusted insight. The above process is entirely valid and an important introduction to the field. But we now have an opportunity to turbo-charge it with a ‘black-belt’ approach to content planning.
Rock solid ideas
Answerthepublic is a great resource which assesses the questions which people type into Google, thereby giving you every possible question a potential patient could ask about every treatment that you offer, prioritised according to the frequency of search.6 For example, for dermal filler, key questions include:
- How do dermal fillers work?
- Are dermal fillers safe?
- Can dermal fillers be dissolved?
- Where can dermal fillers be used?
You can already see that just being able to answer these questions (in blogs, videos, podcasts) is an exceptional way to reach your customers with credibility, with the sure knowledge that you’re giving them information they respect and genuinely need.
Cross reference these terms with Google Trends and you can even discover which products, themes and questions are peaking in popularity for an even more laser-focused approach to content ideas.
Tools like these will give you an endless source of questions which you now know will add value and be appreciated by your customers. Provided you can compete with existing resources to answer these questions by being more thorough, considered, targeted or local, you’re in great shape to create a world of respected content which will move the needle on your customer acquisition.
The advice above from the core process still stands – a great article is around 1,500 words long and optimised for keywords, and you should bring it to life with imagery, video, storytelling, bullet lists and graphics.7
Produce once, reuse plenty
All that said, producing content still requires a little time and effort. A raft of artificial intelligence tools are coming to the fore which make producing text, audio and video easier than ever, but it’s still another job which needs to be done.
It will therefore almost certainly make sense to outsource your production work, but whether you do that or handle it in-house, it makes both financial and marketing sense to maximise the value of the creative assets you produce by reusing and distributing them across all your channels.
That means taking, say, a blog- and then re-purposing it as a video for your website, social and YouTube channels. You have an extraordinary range of reuse options:
- Try taking three key points or themes from the article and turning them into social posts which offer different perspectives on the theme or answers to it
- Create short excerpt versions of the article to post into your Google local business profile, to meet the needs of people searching for local providers
- Deliver them as part of an educational email campaign for your patients and potential newcomers, raising your credibility with each email and reminding them of your expertise so that when the time comes to make a purchase, you’re the first port of call
This, of course, works for other initial media, too. If you happen to be more comfortable in front of a camera than a pencil, that’s just fine. Produce video answers, but then repurpose them into text, snippets and social clips too. Again, there is an increasing list of automations to help you – rev.com, for example, is very good for transcribing video into text which can then be used as the basis of a blog. Rev.com will also instantly create subtitles for your video – perfect for people browsing on social media without sound.8
Content planning for SEO success
SEO is a necessary evil of digital marketing. The sort of person who becomes an aesthetics specialist is not generally the sort of person who likes the repetitive precision of SEO research. We feel your pain. To make it easier and dramatically more effective, the ‘black belt approach’ – produce materials which can position you as an expert in every condition and treatment type you cover, and then distribute it with minimum effort across all channels – comes with a significant benefit. It positions you not only as the right local business owner, but also as the undisputed authority in your market. That’s got to be good for the soul as well as your business.
